Diary of a Philosophy Student, Volume I, 1926-7 (review)

Published for the first time in any language, this volume comprising translations of two of Simone de Beauvoir's notebooks from 1926 to 1927 is a fascinating insight into her early intellectual life. It constitutes the second volume in The Beauvoir Series, an ambitious U.S.-based project led by Margaret A. Simons in consultation with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir to publish and translate a selection of Beauvoir's philosophical and literary writings dating from 1926 to 1979 which were previously unpublished, untranslated or difficult to access. The two notebooks are accompanied by a foreword to the series by Le Bon de Beauvoir, a brief introduction by Simons, two chapters providing literary, historical and philosophical contextualization and an index and extensive annotations to the translations. This indispensable volume offers a panorama of Beauvoir's intellectual preoccupations in the period before she met Jean-Paul Sartre, during which she is struggling to cast off the stringent Catholicism of her youth and elude the censorious maternal 'regard'. Leaving school in 1925 and determined to study philosophy at the Sorbonne (because women were not permitted to study philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure at Sè vres or at the rue d'Ulm), Beauvoir conceded initially to her mother's wishes, studying mathematics, literature and classics at the Institut Catholique and the Institut Sainte-Marie at Neuilly. In 1926, she began to study philosophy at the Sorbonne and to develop a sense of herself as an intellectual with an 'oeuvre' ahead of her, accompanied by a strong social conscience fostered by her work teaching literature to working-class girls for Robert Garric's 'Equipes Sociales' in Belleville. Her focus in these notebooks, however, is predominantly philosophical rather than socio-political as she interrogates issues such as the nature of the authentic self; one's relationship and responsibility to the other; the relationship between reason and emotion; the parameters of choice, circumstance and action —evidence of an embryonic existential ethicist at work with an energetic predilection for self-scrutiny. Beauvoir's work schedule is exacting as she reflects upon her readings of Kant, Bergson, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Barrè s, Claudel, Cocteau, Gide and Alain-Fournier, shared on occasions with her cousin Jacques Champigneulles, for whom she is experiencing a concurrent passion. Readers of Le Deuxième Sexe will note Beauvoir's proto-feminist awareness in her assertions such as that concerning the immorality of marriage on the grounds that it engages 'not only the self of today but also that of tomorrow', her recognition of the trap of romantic love despite its allure and her voluntaristic approach to becoming a 'femme indépendante'. Moreover, these notebooks shed valuable light on the composition of Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (which correspond to the period of 1908–1929) and on her relationship with early intellectual interlocutors such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil and Jean Baruzi. Although the translations are occasionally marred by misunderstandings and over-literalism and the notes vary from being useful to 'wikipedian' in their generality, the translators and editors are to be applauded for their tenacity not only in deciphering Beauvoir's cryptic handwriting but in producing such a valuable contribution to Beauvoir studies.